Error

I don’t know if it’s more or less re­li­able than past re­search sug­gest­ing a lower sa­ti­a­tion point, but tak­ing the pa­per Jebb et al. 2018 at face value, this is the effect of a 160% in­crease in in­come, from $40k to $105k:

In North Amer­ica, life satis­fac­tion goes from 7.63 to 8.0. Zero effect on pos­i­tive af­fect (effects on pos­i­tive af­fect/​hap­piness are always lower and it’s the mea­sure I think is more re­li­able, which is why we chose the term hap­piness in that quote). Nega­tive af­fect-free goes from 0.7 to 0.74.

Effects in Western Europe are a touch smaller.

Whether this counts as “ex­tra in­come con­tin­u­ing to af­fect hap­piness quite a bit” or “ex­tra in­come not af­fect­ing hap­piness that much” I guess is for read­ers to judge.

For my­self, I would re­gard those gains to be suffi­ciently small that I would think it ir­ra­tional for an ego­ist to fo­cus much of their at­ten­tion on earn­ing more money at that point, rather than fos­ter­ing strong re­la­tion­ships, a sense of pur­pose, or im­prov­ing their self-talk.

Per­son­ally, I also ex­pect even those cor­re­la­tions are over­es­ti­mates of the ac­tual effect of higher in­come on hap­piness, be­cause we know the re­verse is also hap­pen­ing: for var­i­ous rea­sons hap­piness it­self causes peo­ple’s in­comes to rise. On top of that, things like health also cause both hap­piness and higher in­comes, in­creas­ing the cor­re­la­tion with­out in­creas­ing the cau­sa­tion. (Though as I de­scribe in my in­come and hap­piness ar­ti­cle, if you have a differ­ent causal di­a­gram in mind, you could also try ar­gu­ing that it’s an un­der­es­ti­mate.)

Re­gard­less of which ca­reer you choose, you can donate 10% of your in­come.

Nor­mally when we think of do­ing good with our ca­reers, we think of paths like be­com­ing a teacher or char­ity worker, which of­ten earn salaries as much as 50% lower than jobs in the pri­vate sec­tor, and may not al­ign with your skills or in­ter­ests. In that sense, giv­ing 10% is less of a sac­ri­fice.

More­over, as we saw in an ear­lier ar­ti­cle, once you start earn­ing more than about $40,000 a year as an in­di­vi­d­ual, any ex­tra in­come won’t af­fect your hap­piness that much, while acts that help oth­ers like giv­ing to char­ity prob­a­bly do make you hap­pier.

To take just one ex­am­ple, one study found that in 122 of 136 coun­tries, if re­spon­dents an­swered “yes” to the ques­tion “did you donate to char­ity last month?”, their life satis­fac­tion was higher by an amount also as­so­ci­ated with a dou­bling of in­come.5 In part, this is prob­a­bly be­cause hap­pier peo­ple give more, but we ex­pect some of the effect runs the other way too.

(Not per­suaded? Read more on whether giv­ing 10% is bet­ter or worse for your hap­piness than not donat­ing at all.)”

i) Like Greg I’ve only ever seen the claim that donat­ing some can be bet­ter for one’s own welfare, com­pared to a baseline of not giv­ing at all—not that the EA ap­proach to giv­ing is ac­tu­ally the op­ti­mal for hap­piness (!).

Giv­ing small amounts reg­u­larly to a va­ri­ety of emo­tion­ally ap­peal­ing causes is more likely to be op­ti­mal for one’s self­ish welfare, at least if you don’t have an EA mind­set which would ren­der that dis­satis­fy­ing. As you say, ‘give 10% once a year to the most effec­tive char­ity’ is likely worse than that.

ii) Un­for­tu­nately I don’t have time to look into whether your source on in­come sa­ti­a­tion points is bet­ter than the older one I used in my ar­ti­cle. Per­son­ally, I think a fo­cus on a ‘sa­ti­a­tion point’ at which in­come yields liter­ally zero fur­ther welfare gain is the wrong way to think about this. I am skep­ti­cal that the curve ever en­tirely flat­tens out, let alone turns back around. Rather I’d ex­pect log­a­r­ith­mic re­turns (or per­haps some­thing a bit sharper), up into the tens or hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars of in­come. Given the difficulty of mea­sur­ing satis­fac­tion, es­pe­cially in the up­per tail of in­come, I would trust this more com­mon sense model over em­piri­cal mea­sure­ments claiming oth­er­wise. Above ~$100,000, ad­di­tional gains in welfare are prob­a­bly just too small for our sur­vey meth­ods to pick up.

For this rea­son 80,000 Hours use more mod­est lan­guage like “any ex­tra in­come won’t af­fect your hap­piness that much”, rather than claiming the effect is noth­ing.

Nonethe­less, at high lev­els of in­come, fur­ther rais­ing one’s in­come grad­u­ally be­comes a minor is­sue, be­fore it be­comes an en­tirely un­mea­surable one. At that point, many peo­ple will bet­ter ac­com­plish their life goals by fo­cussing on im­prov­ing the world—thereby giv­ing them­selves more com­mu­nity, higher pur­pose, sense of ac­com­plish­ment, and in­deed ac­tual ac­com­plish­ment—rather than ek­ing out what limited re­turns re­main from higher earn­ings, and this seems im­por­tant to point out to peo­ple.

iii) So, while I say from an ego­ist per­spec­tive ‘give 10% once a year to the most effec­tive char­ity’ is prob­a­bly dom­i­nated by a ‘fuzzy-hack­ing’ ap­proach to char­ity, that’s not com­pletely ob­vi­ous.

Giv­ing larger amounts, and giv­ing them to the best char­i­ties one can find, of­ten be­comes a core part of peo­ple’s iden­tity, prob­a­bly rais­ing their sense of pur­pose /​ satis­fac­tion with their work at all times, rather than just via a warm glow im­me­di­ately af­ter they donate a small sum. I don’t think any of the ev­i­dence we’ve looked at can ad­dress this is­sue, ex­cept the ob­ser­va­tional stud­ies, which are hope­lessly con­founded by other things.

Fur­ther­more, be­ing part of effec­tive al­tru­ism or Giv­ing What We Can can provide par­ti­ci­pants with a com­mu­nity of peo­ple who they feel some con­nec­tion to, which many peo­ple oth­er­wise lack, and which seems to have a larger effect on hap­piness than money. Fi­nally, giv­ing to the best char­i­ties al­lows peo­ple to show off to them­selves about their un­com­mon in­tel­li­gence and so­phis­ti­ca­tion as a giver, which can also con­tribute to a pos­i­tive self-con­cep­tion.

We know that in­volve­ment in a re­li­gious com­mu­nity is cor­re­lated with large gains in welfare, and in­volve­ment in any philo­soph­i­cal com­mu­nity like effec­tive al­tru­ism seems likely to bring with it some—though not all—of the same benefits.

Of course there are down­sides too. In the ab­sence of any ac­tual data, I would re­main ag­nos­tic, and act as though this were more or less a wash for some­one’s hap­piness. I wouldn’t want some­one to start be­ing al­tru­is­tic ex­pect­ing it to make their life bet­ter, but I’d also want to challenge them if they were con­vinced it would make their life worse.

From this per­spec­tive, ar­ti­cles say­ing that giv­ing or other acts of al­tru­ism are not as detri­men­tal to some­one’s welfare as one might naïvely an­ti­ci­pate, seem to me to be ad­vanc­ing a rea­son­able point of view, even if fu­ture re­search may yet show them to be mis­taken.

“EA some­times ad­vo­cates that giv­ing effec­tively will in­crease your hap­piness. Here’s an 80,000 Hours ar­ti­cle (a) to that effect. … This line of ar­gu­ment con­fuses the effect of donat­ing at all with the effect of donat­ing effec­tively.”

This ar­ti­cle you link to (by me) does not men­tion giv­ing large amounts, or the effec­tive­ness of char­i­ties, or ad­vo­cate for giv­ing to char­ity, so it’s hard to see how it could be con­fus­ing that is­sue. I would ap­pre­ci­ate if you could edit the ar­ti­cle to clar­ify that.

It also doesn’t claim that giv­ing nec­es­sar­ily makes you hap­pier than spend­ing the money on your­self, only that in a given case it is pos­si­ble—which it cer­tainly is—and that giv­ing likely pro­vides more satis­fac­tion than not hav­ing the money in the first place:

“Giv­ing some money to char­ity is un­likely to make you less happy, and may well make you hap­pier. … donat­ing money could eas­ily make you hap­pier than spend­ing it on your­self… there’s good rea­son to think that giv­ing away money will lower your sub­jec­tive well-be­ing sig­nifi­cantly less than not hav­ing it in the first place.”

In fact, the ar­ti­cle only tan­gen­tially dis­cusses dona­tions at all. Nonethe­less, I have added some fur­ther text to clar­ify my view.

I largely agree with this though 12-36 months is per­haps a bit high. When I’ve told new­com­ers to save more and donate less, I’ve usu­ally got­ten the re­sponse that they re­ally want to donate now be­cause it makes them feel hap­pier and more fulfilled. That’s be­cause they want to do good, but don’t see an op­por­tu­nity to con­tribute through ‘di­rect work’ yet, so giv­ing is their main way to feel use­ful.

Inas­much as the goal of giv­ing now is to make some­one feel good about them­selves and mo­ti­vated to con­tinue, my ob­jec­tion is weaker. Though per­haps they should try to get that sense of ac­com­plish­ment some other way while they save.

I’ll just add that I always read it as a highly ten­ta­tive recom­men­da­tion that you’d ex­pect to be over­turned if se­ri­ous re­sources were put into in­ves­ti­gat­ing cli­mate change char­ity—though I’m un­usu­ally in-the-know.

I wrote ‘most rele­vant’ to con­trast that group with peo­ple who know they’ll never be able to do di­rect work at the or­gani­sa­tions sur­veyed, for whom those figures are largely ir­rele­vant. As you say, they’re still not quite right for that group be­cause you’re only part way through the pro­cess (I think by the time you’re offered a job, about half the costs have been paid, though that de­pends on whether you had a trial pe­riod).

They would be even more rele­vant to some­one con­sid­er­ing quit­ting—but as they can talk to their col­leagues, they prob­a­bly wouldn’t be us­ing this sur­vey.

The costs of hiring makes ap­ply­ing to join a pro­ject look worse, but it also makes earn­ing to give to fund the salaries of new staff look worse too. If you’re ex­pect­ing to donate hop­ing the money will be used to fund new hires, it seems like it should can­cel out.

The three ways around bear­ing those costs that I can see at first glance are i) earn­ing to give to pre­vent a group from lay­ing off staff for lack of fund­ing, ii) earn­ing to give to buy cap­i­tal goods rather than hire peo­ple, iii) stay­ing in your cur­rent di­rect work job rather than switch­ing.

Hey Peter—it’s partly for you, but also many other peo­ple who have the same ques­tions.

I can com­ment on the choice of ques­tion in the sur­vey as I’m the one who wrote it.

The rea­son we went for an ex post as­sess­ment rather than an ex ante one was that we thought peo­ple would be able to more re­li­ably as­sess how they feel about a pre­vi­ous hire to­day, than re­mem­ber how they felt about a pre­vi­ous hire in the past.

Ask­ing peo­ple to re­mem­ber what they thought be­fore runs the risk that they will sub­sti­tute a hard ques­tion (what they thought months ago be­fore they knew how some­one would work out) for an easy ques­tion (what do they think given what they know now). Then we’d get a similar an­swer, but it would look ex ante when it ac­tu­ally isn’t.

It also seemed quite difficult for or­gani­sa­tions to fore­cast how much they’ll value a typ­i­cal hire in the fu­ture be­cause, among other rea­sons, it’s difficult to an­ti­ci­pate how suc­cess­ful fu­ture searches will be.

In ret­ro­spect I think the fram­ing we chose was prob­a­bly a mis­take, be­cause the two as­sess­ments are much more differ­ent than most read­ers un­der­stand them to be. I agree with your sug­ges­tions for im­prove­ments and, in­deed, we con­cluded our blog post with our plans to ask new ques­tions next year or else in­ter­view a smaller num­ber of peo­ple in more depth.

Hope­fully a differ­ent ap­proach next year will help us avoid this con­fu­sion go­ing for­ward.

As for the ar­ti­cle be­ing mis­lead­ing, we’ve:

i) Com­mented that these roles are hard to fill at the point when these figures are first men­tioned.

ii) Ex­plained the ex post, ex ante dis­tinc­tion in the rele­vant sec­tion, and now added a link to this post.

iii) Noted we don’t have much con­fi­dence in the an­swers to that ques­tion and would not recom­mend that peo­ple up­date very much based on it.

I agree in fu­ture we should con­sider con­duc­ing differ­ent sur­veys of other groups—in­clud­ing peo­ple who don’t iden­tify as part of the EA com­mu­nity—about op­por­tu­ni­ties they’re aware of in or­der to make sure we stay abreast of all the ar­eas we recom­mend, rather than just those we are clos­est to.

If you look at these graphs end­ing in Jan­uary 2017 I think you’ll agree that a polyno­mial of de­gree 3 (cu­bic) seems like the best fit: https://​imgur.com/​a/​9SlFZd9 .

If that’s right we would ex­pect some­thing like 5,000 mem­bers by now.

It oc­curs to me now that all of these trend-lines are a bit bi­ased to­wards fore­cast­ing rapid growth, as they finish right at the end of the 2016 holi­day cam­paign which ab­sorbed sub­stan­tial re­sources. This was the high­est pe­riod of growth, and likely not sus­tain­able. It might be more rea­son­able to put the end-date in ~April and then we can fit the trend-line to a less cycli­cal curve.

The effort re­quired to set up a non-profit trad­ing ac­count, go through KYC, make it se­cure, teach ev­ery­one in the org how it works, and do the nec­es­sary le­gal, bud­getary and ac­count­ing com­pli­ance each year make this much more than a few minute job. Things that are easy for in­di­vi­d­u­als are of­ten less straight­for­ward for or­gani­sa­tions.

I can sec­ond this. I pre­fer to down­load long pieces of text to my phone to read on Pocket/​In­stapa­per. In ad­di­tion, putting this re­port up as a web page will make it much more likely to be passed around on so­cial me­dia, Red­dit, Hacker News, and so on.